Headspaces
by Eponymous Rose
Summary: Doc was pretty sure he was just grumpy because he needed a nap and a snack, and maybe a little less existential angst in his diet. Set during season 8.


_First, do no harm._

Okay, so maybe it was '_First, lobby against socialist reform_' now, but Doc had always had a soft spot for the classics. Besides, it wasn't a half-bad philosophy to apply to life in general, y'know, doing your best to keep from making other people's lives harder? Couldn't really go wrong with that one.

Funny thing: he still dreamt like he was Omega, sometimes. And that involved echoes of evil laughter, sure, but the thing he remembered most was the weirdly freeing feeling, the utter lack of responsibility, of guilt. As long as he put in a token effort to keep Omega from being too megalomaniacal, then hey, he was probably doing all right, nobody could fault him for that. Lots of people got possessed by evil artificial intelligences and tried to kill their friends. _Lots_ of people. It was like a vacation, almost, from the stuff in your own head.

There was a lot of stuff in Doc's head these days. Being held prisoner by assholes who occasionally beat him up and were probably trying to kill his friends sort of got the ol' neurons firing. At least they were taking lots of long walks. That was usually good for clearing his head.

Wash, he noticed, had been holding his left arm at an awkward angle for the past couple miles of trudging. Doc tried very hard to pretend he hadn't seen it, because, you know. Held prisoner by assholes and all that.

_First, do no harm_.

He waited until Meta had moved up to scout ahead a little, then hung back to walk beside Wash, who didn't even seem to notice. His head was tilted down, like he was expending all his attention on watching his feet, like it was a Huge Important Thing that he was terrified he'd screw up and the universe would implode as a result. That was just kind of how Wash was. Doc had seen him eat standard-issue ration bars with a Purpose.

"Hey," Doc said, and stopped himself short from resting a hand on Wash's shoulder, because the guy pretty much radiated _don't-touch-me_ at all times, and Doc was sure Wash and Meta hadn't even remotely heard of the whole do-no-harm thing. He still had bruises from their little interrogation. "You feeling okay?"

Wash snapped his head up, his whole body going ramrod-stiff and defensive. Yeah, okay. Bad move. Doc quickly amended his question, "I mean, is your arm okay?"

Wash looked down at his arm like he'd just now noticed it was attached to his body. "It's fine," he said, aiming for 'gruff' but landing somewhere closer to 'confused'.

"Look, I mean, I'm a medic and all. I could take a gander." Doc squinted at Wash's armor readouts on his helmet's HUD. "Your body temperature's up. Whatever it is, it's probably infected. Can I see?"

"Turn that off unless I ask you for a medical opinion," Wash said, biting off each word like it was a complete order in and of itself. "And I told you, just answer the questions you're asked. That means you don't ask any questions. Why you people can't follow a simple fucking order..."

For Wash, that was practically an eloquent speech. Doc held up his hands. "Yeesh, testy. I was just asking. Don't come crying to me when it, like, falls off or whatever. I'm not great at reattaching limbs. Lots of stuff needs to be connected right. It's complicated."

"Shut up and keep walking."

"_Rude_," Doc muttered, just loud enough for Wash to hear him, and jogged up a little to see if he could catch a glimpse of Meta's gleaming armor over the next sand dune.

They stopped for the night at the usual time, around when Doc started seriously worrying about getting blisters on his heels, because _ow_. Meta and Wash had a low-voiced argument—well, one low voice and one indecipherable growl, because clearly Meta wasn't scary enough _without_ the snarling—which ended with Meta stalking off to go, like, patrol the perimeter or whatever he did when he had first watch. Wash just sort of stood in place for a while, flexing his left hand, staring off into space.

Doc got tired of watching him work up the nerve to do whatever and just plunked down where he stood, unlatching his helmet and running a hand through his hair. All the sand he'd be getting in unmentionable places was totally worth it to get a little fresh air. These suits didn't _breathe_ very well. Meta and Wash didn't seem to mind, but for all Doc knew they had the things welded to their skin or something. Freelancers were apparently hardcore that way.

He also liked that Wash seemed to get really uncomfortable whenever Doc took off his helmet, like he could almost pretend there wasn't a person under that armor otherwise and didn't much appreciate the reminder. Well, good. The jerk deserved to feel a little uncomfortable sometimes about ordering giant terrifying supersoldiers to beat him up.

He leaned back in the sand, propping himself up on his elbows, and stared up at the too-bright stars. He used to love 'em, but stars and all that space stuff kinda freaked him out now. They made him think, y'know, deep thoughts or whatever, and these days that tended to lead back to Omega. He wondered, sometimes, what the others had felt when they'd been infected. Had they been better at fighting off the intrusive thoughts, the gleeful lust for blood and death?

Had they managed to get the connection to work both ways?

Because that was kinda the thing. He felt like Omega had pretty much figured Medic Frank DuFresne out in the space of a couple minutes, had scrutinized him and found out all his secrets and went, "Okay, is that seriously all you've got?" And meanwhile Doc had been scrabbling for any sort of purchase on Omega's personality beyond, "Yes let's kill them all, muahahaha, etc." And he couldn't picture, like, _Tex_ being comfortable with that. And she'd had Omega the longest, right? He wondered what she'd figured out about Omega. He wondered how she'd figured it out. He tried not to feel jealous, because that was seriously unproductive and he'd been trying to purge that kind of negative thinking lately.

Stupid stars, anyway.

Wash was standing over him. His fever, Doc noted clinically and not at all with a little pang of worry, had gone up another couple of degrees. He stared down at Doc for a long time, then said, like he was making up his mind, "Hey, I think you should maybe look at this."

"No," said Doc, surprising even himself.

Wash straightened a little, squaring his shoulders. "No?" His voice cracked a little with his incredulity.

"Look," Doc said, and tried not to think about how he was probably just grumpy because he needed a nap and a snack and a little less existential angst in his diet, "I'm a prisoner, so just _order_ me to look at it or whatever. You keep _asking_ like I've really got a choice in the matter. And you clearly don't respect my opinion enough to listen when I offer to help. So, you know what? No. Fix your own arm."

There was a short, exasperated huff of breath behind Wash's helmet, and for a second Doc thought he was going to turn away and go growl at Meta some more, and then Doc would feel bad because, y'know. _Do no harm_.

Then Wash sat down next to him in a sort of controlled collapse that had nothing of his usual careful economy of motion, and started peeling at the left gauntlet of his armor.

Doc pushed himself into a sitting position. "What're you doing?"

Wash grunted, tugging the gauntlet away with a hiss of pain. Doc immediately recognized, from his long and unfortunately extensive experience, the stench of decaying flesh. "Fixing my own damn arm."

Doc rolled his eyes, and shuffled around to Wash's other side, grabbing his arm by the wrist and turning it to expose the wound. Yeah. That didn't look good. It looked like maybe a burn or something—probably from the fight where Donut had been killed, it looked about that old—and it had started to fester, going all gross and necrotic around the edges. "I thought you said you had a healing unit. Why didn't you fix this then?"

Wash was breathing hard, and his voice was a little weak, like he hadn't really expected it to look that awful. "I didn't think it was that bad," he said. "I had bigger problems that needed healing first. And I tried fixing it yesterday, but the unit just sort of gave up on it."

"Yeah, it'd just heal the skin over the wound, which wouldn't do you much good here. Those things aren't too smart, but they usually know when they're gonna make something worse. You need to keep something like this open," Doc concluded, putting on his best confident-medic voice, which mainly consisted of excising the words 'I think' from his vocabulary.

Even with his helmet on, Wash managed to look a little green. "Can't you use your medical gun thing?"

Doc stared down at it thoughtfully. "Simmons kinda messed with it. I don't think it really does the medical thing anymore." He felt a weird pang of guilt at the thought, like he'd lost something really important, something intrinsic to his whole being. _Do no harm_. "But I've still got my emergency pack. Maybe a little old-school, but I can drain the wound, clean it out and bandage it, give you some antibiotics that should knock this thing for a loop. We drilled this a lot at my last training rotation. You'll be fine." His best confident-medic voice also included avoiding the word 'probably'.

Wash gave a little skeptical snort, but didn't protest when Doc handed him the little white antibiotic tablets, somehow managing to swallow them without taking off his helmet. Super-special Freelancer powers, no doubt. In return, Doc didn't push his luck by starting up conversation, just did his job quickly and efficiently, cringing every time Wash sucked in a pained breath, which was pretty often, because _ouch_.

He was nearly finished bandaging, leaning over Wash's arm in intense concentration, when he felt a little bump against the side of his head. He pulled back a bit, and was startled to realize it was Wash's helmet. Was he, like, trying to _headbutt_...? Oh. No, his head was definitely lolling a little, and Doc could hear soft, even breathing, and his pulse and BP were finally down to a more reasonable, less stressed-out, less _Wash_-ish level.

He'd fallen asleep sitting up.

Doc quickly finished bandaging the arm and backed away a little. He couldn't really remember seeing Wash sleep. Either of them, really. He knew it had to happen sometime, but whenever they stopped for the night he was generally so tired he just passed out on his way to the ground, and then he'd wake up to Wash nudging him with a boot or Meta growling at him (and that had to be the single most awful alarm clock in the universe, but at least it was really darn effective). This? This was weird. Disarming, sorta.

_Do no harm._

Wash wasn't a sound sleeper, though, and maybe Doc should've guessed that by the way the guy was wound so tight at the best of times. He twitched and sighed and mumbled, and Doc thought again about Omega and shivered in the night's gathering cold.

It didn't last long; Wash's head finally bobbed too far forward, and he jerked awake with a clumsy, scrabbling grab for his pistol. He stopped mid-draw, just sort of looked at Doc for a while, and Doc, for once, kept his mouth shut.

Then Wash grabbed his discarded gauntlet, refastened it over the bandages, and shoved himself to his feet, pacing off into the dunes. Doc watched him go, then sighed and fell back into the sand. He'd clean up his pack in the morning.

"You're welcome," he mumbled to the sky, and closed his eyes tight against the harshness of the stars.


End file.
